Does March Madness need a time-out?

Leonard Kass, a neuroscientist at the University of Maine in Orono, is a fan of his school's women's basketball team. An unexpected defeat suffered several years ago in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament disappointed Kass, but it also made him wonder about the team's poor showing. "They just looked like they were out of phase," he says.

Kass' comment is more than a fan's analysis. He has an interest in circadian rhythms, daily cycles of physiological activity that every organism experiences. Since the Maine team traveled to the West Coast for their game and played earlier in the day than normal, Kass speculated that the players suffered from a disruption in their biological clocks, a phenomenon commonly called jet lag. Other researchers have suggested a similar jet lag effect in professional baseball and football.

Kass has now backed up his hoops hypothesis with hard data and calls upon the NCAA to avoid having tournament teams travel across multiple time zones. "Travel is a part of every NCAA sport, during regular season and championship competition," responds NCAA spokesperson Jane Jankowski, noting that NCAA has not yet had a chance to review Kass' work.

Kass turned to the men's collegiate basketball tournament nicknamed March Madness to provide the statistical power to address his premise. The men's competition has 64 teams divided into four regional tournaments. Since the NCAA ranks the 16 teams in each region, Kass had a simple way to evaluate whether a game's outcome was an upset.

Over the past 5 years, higher-ranked teams that had to travel across the country to play were almost twice as likely to be upset in first-round games as those playing in their own time zone, Kass and a colleague found. "The kiss of death is shifting three time zones," says Kass. "If [higher-ranked teams] shift across three time zones, they have a better than 50 percent chance of losing."

The investigators also looked at whether the time of the game influences the outcome. Their initial analysis shows that higher-ranked teams lose more frequently in afternoon games than in evening ones. The scientists next plan to incorporate home-court advantage into the analysis. Accounting for factors such as injuries, extraordinary coaching, and inaccurate rankings by the NCAA will be more difficult, if not impossible, he notes.